


Examinations On Implied Mad Scientist-and-Minion Relationships

by brawltogethernow



Category: Girl Genius, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mad Scientists, BAMF John Watson, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Doomsday Devices, Gen, In-Universe Clichés, Mad Scientists, Noodle Incidents, POV Sally, inventions based on bad puns, you know - the usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 05:42:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2681213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawltogethernow/pseuds/brawltogethernow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world ruled by mad science, Sherlock is a mad scientist and John is <i>clearly</i> his minion. Right? Right. Obviously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Examinations On Implied Mad Scientist-and-Minion Relationships

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://iztarshi.tumblr.com/post/78214819125/if-bbc-sherlock-was-set-in-ggverse-all-the-jokes), mostly written in an afternoon, forgotten about. And now brought here, to you!
> 
> If you're coming here from the _Sherlock_ side and aren't familiar with _Girl Genius_ , Sparks are mad scientists, people with a genetic inclination to attract minions, bend the laws of physics, cackle madly, and vow to show them, show them all. Sherlock would definitely be one.

They called Sherlock in to investigate the latest travesty caused by some mad Spark.

He was, in Sally’s opinion, the maddest of the lot, and bound to snap someday if he wasn't already secretly mind-controlling his flat's tenants or turning homeless people into hyperefficient messenger pigeons or something. But until she had proof of that, they needed him.

"We need his crazy to understand their crazy," Greg would say, when she bugged him about it. And this certainly was crazy. She'd give them that.

She squinted at him now as he strode purposefully across the ruin which _used_ to be most of a residential building, still covered in faintly smoking raspberry jam. ("Oh, it's _blasting jelly_ ," Anderson said when they got to the scene. "Gettit?") John Watson was a few feet behind him, but bouncing less. Sherlock’s long jacket (ridiculous) practically seemed to be maneuvering itself around the sticky scenery. Well, maybe it was. He could have loomed it personally.

He looked around and grinned, one Spark delighted with another Spark's work. Disaster waiting to happen, it was. He leaned over (cautiously, which was better than you could expect from a Spark) to a nearby surface and took a deep sniff (she'd tried that, but it just smelled like regular jam), bounded over to what they'd roughly identified as the kitchen area like an overenthusiastic puppy (Watson rolled his eyes and stepped after him), and ducked utterly gracelessly to crouch next to one of the largest slabs of rubble in the most thoroughly red area. "Blasting jelly,” he said, peering into the shadowed space between the big building chunk and a knee-high remnant of an internal wall. “Very droll."

Sherlock Holmes never seemed grounded. She didn't think he saw _people,_ just test subjects and raw data. In someone who could warp the laws of life, that was dangerous. Not that anyone was going to start listening to her now.

At least his shadow could be counted on to be a voice of reason.

Watson was still there, feet a few steps behind Sherlock's, mild as you please, very 'I'll get that wrench you wanted right away, master.' Sally tried not to wrinkle her nose (not that anyone would have noticed with the smoking jelly). She hated minions, maybe more than she hated madboys. Why would anybody _willingly_ do that? They ran enough of the world without running _people_ too.

Greg had tried to tell her that some people were just _natural minions_ , but she'd scoffed at him and made him buy the next round. There was nothing _natural_ about that.

Sherlock had always been high on crazy but low on charisma, and he'd never had any minions before that she'd known him. Until John Watson.

He'd had some sort of background in field engineering, from the way he analyzed scenes, though he said he'd been in field _medicine._ She could respect that. People needed to know there were normal doctors who could knock you out without succumbing to the desire to reattach your hands to your head.

It still gave her the creeps that he was slumming it with Sherlock Holmes, who strutted around performing miracles all the while looking at the world like it was one big puzzle to solve. That was going to go bad, one day. Sally was sure of it.

Sherlock rustled around in his giant coat, pulled out - yep, those were definitely hawking gloves - put on the right-hand one, reached in behind the big wedge, and extricated some giant pocket watch/astrolabe thing. He appeared to briefly suppress the urge to cackle. Instead he said, "John, what do you think?" and tossed it to Watson.

Watson caught it like they were in an egg toss at a garden party and not an incredibly dangerous crime scene. "It's a matter agitating engine, Sherlock." He clicked something, suddenly unfolding three new layers. "A pretty brilliant matter agitating engine. Except - oh wait. _Oh._ Oh, that's actually pretty devious. But why would you - ? No." He wrenched at the casing, kind of savagely, and one of the pretty fanning bits folded even _further_ open, like some madly scientific pop-up book. In _this_ bit there was clockwork twisting back and forth in a non-Euclidian dance. Greg grimaced in alarm, because suddenly they were dealing with _active Spark tech_ and Sherlock didn't seem to be paying attention.

("But how did you know it was there?" some dumbass tech was asking, all agog and dazzled.

"Slab of mortar,” Sherlock was saying boredly, not looking away from the goo, “toward the center of the obvious blast radius but not covered in any of the conductive substance, so it fell from somewhere else, maybe the ceiling, not that anyone could tell now, so it was probably covering something interesting...")

“ _Ugh,_ ” said Watson, hovering a hand back and forth before tapping the piece he’d been following with a metallic _ting!_ “So that’s the configuration you would use to get a counter-read on the local atomic resonance, but then this structure would just corrupt the readings and make the output - Chrissake. _Why would you do that?_ ”

As the harmonics laced through his tone, Sally felt herself take an involuntary half-step back.

No way.

“These are designed to feed into each other so that… No," Watson was saying. "Surely, no one would be that stupid. They can’t have possibly thought pitting these signals against each other would achieve anything! Somebody did this _on purpose._ But it’s utter idiocy! _No wonder this thing exploded!_ ”

The techs who weren't watching Sherlock were starting to sweat a little.

Watson reached into the device and snagged a gear, seemingly extricating it from the nauseating current of clockwork without hesitating. “ _This is disgusting! This is a travesty of science! **Somebody get me a wrench.**_ ”

Sherlock finally decided to pay attention to his flatmate, looking up from a meaningless splatter of debris to focus pale eyes on the man Sally had been definitely sure was his creepily devoted lackey five minutes ago. “John?”

“ ** _What?_** ”

Sherlock swept out a hand to take in the gaggle of variably cringing or discomfited police officers, patterns deep in the collective hindbrain making them look more and more like cowering townspeople. “You’re unnerving the homicide division.”

“ _What?_ Oh. Oh, sorry.” He appeared to come back to himself a bit. He whacked the device with his elbow and it made an indignant  _Eeeeeeeeeeeeee_ sound and then ceased its tidal motion. Then he snapped his fingers, once in front of his face, twice to the side of his head, and blinked twice, looking sheepish and more like ordinary tea-and-jumpers John Watson than a towering force of nature.

It occurred to Sally that she’d never seen him really agitated before. She revisited a few months of memories of Watson and Sherlock cooing over some madboy’s inventions together, recategorized them in a different context.

It was Greg, immunized to the voice and the bearing from years pre-Watson looking after Sherlock, who recovered first to ask, “You’re a _Spark?!_ ”

“Hmm?” John said, eyes distinctly refocusing. “Oh, well, yes.” A wry look. “How on Earth did you think I was putting up with Sherlock?”

“But you always seem so…so…” Greg looked an odd kind of devastated. Sally knew the feeling. Watson had a down-to-Earth solidity that had looked reassuring next to the effervescent but impersonal whirlwind that was the consulting detective.

"Well, anyone looks grounded next to him," Watson said, laughing, clearly making a joke out of it. He said it mildly, once again nondescript as anything, but with a raw and dangerous excitement in his eyes. It was so subtle, Sally could barely even blame herself for falling for the Normal Guy act. Barely.

“John is really very controlled,” said Sherlock, stepping up, seeming to have felt the need to step in and show off his apparently-not-a-minion. (Could Sparks have weaker Sparks as minions? Was there some kind of food chain?) The man sounded impressed in that way the two of them had which had totally given the entire division the wrong idea. It was respect among equals, apparently.

“Well if that’s a quality you prize, Sherlock,” Greg muttered, “you certainly haven’t been showing it.”

“So,” came a dazed voice from somewhere in the gaggle of staring officers, “you’re not his minion?”

“Of course he isn’t, said Sherlock, pulling himself up like a huffy exotic waterbird. “I keep telling you he’s not my minion.”

“I’m not his minion,” said John flatly.

"I have always made it clear that I consider John my equal!”

“Yes, but…” said Greg, “we didn’t think you meant…well we didn’t think you meant he was as mad as you!”

“Well,” said Watson, apparently feeling the appropriate response was to chuckle ruefully at this, “I don’t think anyone’s quite as mad as him.”

“Now don’t sell yourself short, John. That fix you came up with for the broken doorbell was positively uncanny.”

“That was _your_ device?!” spluttered Greg. “That thing almost took my head off!”

“But you thought the beer it made was good, right, Greg?”

“John, why do you insist on calling him _Greg?_ ”

“That’s his _name,_ Sherlock….”

Sally felt the need to step in at this point before the paths the conversation tread could get too familiar. “So wait,” she said, just to clarify, “You’re not from some big old family like _that one_ ’s -” she jerked her head, “- I should have heard of, are you?”

The Holmeses were an old ruling house, known for being pretty consistently as mad as they come for generations, and could probably take down the continent if it ever occurred to them to leave their lands, or if the eccentrics they threw out now and then didn’t seem content to work for established rulers or strike out on their own to get killed by mobs. (One would come for Sherlock any day. Sally was sure of it. She always thought Watson would go down fighting for him - She still thought that, but now the image involved more death rays.)

“Nope,” says Watson, with an unassuming grin she would never buy again for a second, “just a rural Spark, me.”

“Your great-grandmother on your mother’s side invented those fabulous clockwork ducks,” Sherlock put in, clearly unable to resist showing off his _lab partner._

“She did,” conceded Watson, “but Lady Hamish’s ducks were banned after they took cleaning lakes too far and started biting swimmers, remember?”

Greg looked like he was about to have an apoplexy. Sally felt about the same.

**Author's Note:**

> If the Holmes canon existed in the GG-verse, it would probably be taught in Spark and Minion Studies courses as a prime example of subtextual Spark-and-minion relationships in literature, the same way we teach it in Which Characters Were Totally Banging 101. In the show, John could easily be a normal guy, but hey, he'd make a _great_ Spark.


End file.
